Good evening, everyone. First, I want to apologize for what happened. We're all in technology and we all know that testing a new thing the first time something goes live, there's a big chance things happen. So this is a new place and it was like testing a production. My name is David Ganger. I'm the founder of DevX and your host for tonight. I started these roundtables as part of a lifelong passion for technology and a commitment to growing our industry. It's time we took our place alongside the giants of Silicon. We have done it in other industries and we can do it in tech. I'm so happy to see you networking and sharing knowledge because that's what it's all about. Each of you has nailed something in technology that makes you great. Some of you have been around for a while, others are new. Wherever you are in terms of growth, scaling up is the long-term vision. Despite the profound difference between growth and scale, most people can't distinguish between the two. Technology is hard, technology is messy. It matters whether you are a startup or a tech giant. Understanding how to navigate from small to large is the focus of this roundtable. Funny enough, technology is not possible without people. That's because at its core, technology is a reflection of human creativity, values, and vision. Hiring is part of both growth and scaling. I'm sure you know DevX is the only staffing firm that works exclusively with technology, with technologists and developers in the firm market. Getting a sense of the ideal team for you now and for the business you want to have in the future is part of the visioning that is so critical. DevX isn't just a staffing agency; we're here for you as a collaborative partner in tech. I look forward to the conversations that follow every DevX roundtable, and tonight we're privileged to be connecting with three very important guests. All have walked the path and can provide their insights and wisdom. Kanan Glick's vast experience in the business of technology makes him uniquely qualified to ask the hard questions. I want to thank him for giving his time and energy to help shape the event tonight and welcome him as the moderator for our discussion. Raful Hoysman is a business growth strategist and has a long history with tech teams at very large companies, and he brings that enormous perspective to our conversation. As a technology coach, he can address both the strategies and the methodologies that answer key questions. Hit Krin is the CEO of Okitech, which he has been running successfully for the past 16 years. In contrast to the foundational perspective, Hit understands small businesses and the pains of growing it. Tonight's important discussion will be looking at scaling a technology team from both micro and macro perspectives. Thank you all so much for coming. Kanan, the stage is yours. Good evening, everybody. Good afternoon. So, we had a little bit of an emergency here, so the time got a little cut short for the networking. I'm sure that they'll let us stay a little longer if everybody wants to network a little more after the event. But we don't want to oversleep too much, so if we can get started, please. For the record, they want you to think that was an emergency. The real truth is, if we get too nervous, we'll just trigger the fire alarm again. So if you can have everybody please sit down or if you want to schmooze, you can go outside again. So good evening everybody and thank you for coming, and thank you again for David for putting on this event. And not only this event, this event is a manifestation of what his passion is in building a community, and the AIM community of tech developers. My boys, if it's not going to be interesting, then just tell us and we'll just pack it up and we'll start networking again. So, like I said, thank you for David for putting in the effort for making and creating a community, the Yiddish community that are in technology and technology development, and at least the opportunity of three times a year at a minimum that people should be able to meet and talk and network together. As his introduction was, two guests over here tonight, we have Raful and Yitzhak. One of them is the founder, and that's Yitzhak. And Raful is the consultant from the outside and he's been in large technology companies, large systems, large organizations. So he understands the concept from a big company and where people are always striving to be. So the burning question that everybody came to listen to tonight was what's the definition of scale? So in order to start the conversation, what is the difference between scale and growth? Raful, if you can please give your... So one of the rules that I apply a lot in business is you've got to keep it simple. You need to have simple foundations, simple rules in order to really make sure that you can have a good toolset to keep applying the same things over and over again, because as you try to scale, as you try to build a business, it's going to be the same concepts and the same rules over and over again. So to me, the definition of growing versus scaling is very simple. When we're thinking about growing, it's all about how do we set the foundations up well for a company? How do we even make sure that foundationally the company is functioning well? Now that could be done from many different angles, many different perspectives, but growing is always about making sure from day-to-day things are done right. Whether you're focusing on marketing, on sales or technology, it's all about those foundations. Scaling is about having processes, systems, and behaviors in place to exponentially grow those strong foundations. In order to scale, you need to first know how to grow properly. You need to have those basic foundations in place. Only then can you scale. So if you can please elaborate what means what, when you call foundations, what would be, let's say, three things that you would call core foundations? The first thing I would say is you've got to have the right people in place. It sounds very obvious, but it's actually very common that... One second again, everybody in the back, if you can please, it's hard to hear. If you can just be quiet, thanks. Yeah, we've got to do something about acoustics here. Practically speaking, when you try to grow a business or you try to scale a business, it's all about having the right people, right? So the first thing is the people that were right for your business a year ago might not be the right same people for what you need now. So you always have to identify who are the right people. The second thing is you have to really know what your bottlenecks are. What are the things that are really stopping your business? And once you understand what those bottlenecks are and have measures in place to track them, you want to focus on fixing only the largest bottleneck. Think about it this way: you have a factory, your factory, let's say, produces cars. You can turn out 10 steering wheels a day, 20 tires, but only one motorblock, right? No matter how many steering wheels you can produce per day, you're never going to build more than one car a day because you can't have more than one motorblock. And even more so, what's going to happen is you're going to start building up a very big inventory. If you keep building up, you know, 10 steering wheels and 20 tires every day, but only one motorblock, you're going to have so much inventory that it's going to lose you money. Money is going to be stuck in the inventory and, you know, space-wise, you're probably going to get overwhelmed, right? So you've got to understand where's your biggest bottleneck. If right now your biggest bottleneck is that one motorblock, you've got to figure out how to increase that, right? So understanding the bottlenecks in every business is the same rules, the same applications. How do you find them and then how do you get rid of them? So Yitzhak, if you can please tell us from the inside, as a small business owner that has scaled, went through the growing process and the scaling process, what is your definition and what's the difference between scale and growth? So I'll first start, as was mentioned before, my focus is on small business and everything, all my inputs tonight is going to be specifically talking about small business. I just want to summarize in my definition of what's applicable here for small business as I will continue the conversation, the difference between growth and scale. To me, they're both the same. They're both here to accomplish the same thing, to grow revenue. The biggest difference between them is cost involved. Growth, you do in a way you increase in cost, while when you scale, the idea is to keep cost at minimal. For that, you must make sure that you are able to scale. If you don't have the systems, you don't know the ins, you don't know the outs, you're not going to be able to scale. So, as a practical example, at first I wanted to give a very simple example with food, but I was told to give more practical examples in business. So, everybody here knows when you onboard a new account what it involves. There's a lot of systems, depending how complicated your company is. You have to set up the account, you have to collect information. There's a lot of human errors and there's a lot of things which could go wrong, and I'm sure everybody here deals with this type of issues and it takes a lot of time. In my case, in my company, Vocate, it used to take hours to create an account from scratch and to get it up and running. Once we passed a few years, actually, it didn't happen from one day to the next. We identified every step in the way where we were able to give instructions, do this, this, this, that, and those steps, we were able to automate the process. So now, after we automated the process, instead of taking hours, it takes minutes, which means we could scale that process, that growth process, we could scale it now instead of having, you know, the same person could onboard in a day many accounts instead of just one or two. So that is in a simple way the difference between growth and scale. Thank you, very good. So I would just summarize what they both said. I have a saying: "Process is king, but don't let it rule you." Meaning, process is the only way how to scale, but don't let it rule you means always adjust, always be cognizant of the fact that sometimes you have to change the process, update the process, or tweak the process. Anybody want to chime in on that? Sure, it's everybody has a process and there's always going to be something to tweak, right? But that's really where I'm coming in and saying it's actually very simple and there's some very basic core rules that you've got to just keep in your head and go over and over and over again at any stage in your business. It's those foundations that are going to make you successful. So how do you make sure that your business at the core is working well, right? Are your account managers doing the right things? Whatever it is, foundationally, are you sound? Then you can start scaling. How do you scale? How do you even make sure that things are done right? You need to have the right process in place. But at first, you've got to find those bottlenecks. You're going to always have to be on the lookout for what is currently my biggest bottleneck. And as a business owner, that should be something that's on your head every single day, every single moment. Because if you don't know where your bottlenecks are, there's no way for you to identify them and then get rid of them. One thing that's really important here is that when we think about scaling businesses, very often we think about, okay, let's add people, let's add this, let's add, you know, let's throw more resources at it. But it's the abstractions that really allow you to scale when you remove things or you remove obstacles or remove things that don't work well, right? So often removing is more powerful than adding and that is really, really key. And the only way to know where you've got to make those changes, you've got to know where your obstacles are, and that's through the bottlenecks. You've got to know where are those bottlenecks. So you want to say, so to explain it better, the fundamentals of the idea of scaling and where we should go with that, and small businesses, there's a concept which is called a product market fit. And I'm sure a lot of people heard about it, and the ins and outs. And product market fit basically in a nutshell means that you need, but before we get to this, I want to make a little bit of a preview. So I think the next question is like this: every company, especially in the technology industry, there are, let's call it, three fundamentals that have to be in place. You have to have marketing, you have to have sales, and you have to have a product, right? That's sort of, without those three, you can't do anything. So the question really is, what are the fundamentals that need to be in place in these three verticals, we would call them, in a company in order to go to move from growth to scale? Exactly. So that's where I started, it's the product-market fit concept, which is involved with those three aspects. But it's not just you have a product, you know your customers, you know how to sell it, that doesn't do anything. We all know situations where somebody had a great idea and they went to friends and family and everybody told them, "You have a great product, you just go out, develop it, get it developed, and you'll make a mint. I mean, I know so many accounts which will sign up, the demand will be crazy." We all know the outcome from that situation. That's usually where you have the product, you think you know the market, and you think you know the customers. Product-market fit is not that. Product-market fit means you have that customer, the customer which needs your product. It could be a big account, it could be a small account. Usually, it doesn't go together. It could be how you market that, how do you get to that customer? Is it plays, is it regular ads in the leadership papers? Is it online advertising? Is it social media? Or is it word of mouth? You need to know every aspect of it. I could dive in very in detail about the product-market fit, but it's not the place. If anybody wants to learn more, I actually navigated that project myself and I learned a lot about it. So to conclude, once you know your product and your product-market fit, that means it's a real fit. It's a real product and you know how to sell it, and all you need to do is increase that. That's where scaling comes into play. So, if you can please give us an example that you've been working with so many of these technology companies, large and small, of a failed project or an achieved growth to scale transition. Sure, but before doing that, I want to actually disagree with you. What? I want to disagree with you. I don't think you need to have those three things to have a successful business. What you need to have is you need to have a product and like you were saying, a product-market fit. Whether you need marketing is going to depend if that's your bottleneck, right? If you're doing really well word-of-mouth and right now you're at the limit of what you can reach, getting marketing is going to be the wrong thing, right? And there's plenty of companies that did zero marketing in the beginning, and actually people were like, you know, desperate to come to them. A really good example is Slack. Slack actually grew out of like a need internally in the company. They needed a better communication system. They built internally and then other companies saw that and they wanted the same product, right? So it's about having a good product, a product that people need and want, and then understanding where in your business is that bottleneck in your growth. Sometimes it is going to be marketing, very often it is actually, but not always, right? Sometimes it's sales, sometimes it's a limitation in your product. You know, there's that one more feature that people need in order to really like get that less growth. Okay, so I like this agreement. So I'll just throw it back that actually word of mouth is also a form of marketing. Sure, absolutely. But again, the reason why I disagree with it is because we put a lot of stock in words and definitions. And when people talk about marketing, they think about, "Oh, I've got to have somebody for marketing. I've got to have a marketing team." I think you have a lot to say about this. I don't know if you want to like jump in. I want to make a statement: word of mouth referrals will only come if there's a product market fit. What you need to do is go to the person who referred that account, ask him what made you tell that other person about my product, and you'll learn a lot from that. That's part of the process to identify your product market fit. But I want to make it clear, no one is going to refer your company, your product, or your service if it's not a perfect product market fit. Okay, so moving on to the next subject that we wanted to discuss. Given that the Jewish market in general when it comes to technology companies is largely B2B products, there's hardly any B2C technology products. Now, when everybody thinks about scale, everybody thinks about Facebook or, um, I'll give you some other examples of B2B products, B2C products that are usually, Google is a B2 technically B2C product to a certain degree as a user, but Uber, anyway, Uber, exactly, right? B2C products, those are the ones that everybody knows about that really achieved scale in the B2C market. You have, uh, let's say Salesforce and et cetera and Slack, et cetera. So, given that the users technology companies are mostly B2B, is every technology company have the ability to achieve scale? That's really the question. No, I would like to refer to you to give me, give us some, yeah, I mean your wisdom on this. Plain out, it's no, not every company is going to have the opportunity, but it's not because they're B2C or B2B or anything else. It's often because they're focused on the wrong thing. And what happens a lot in the Jewish business world is we have incredibly smart people. We have incredibly driven people and there's generally no lack of talent. Most people that are in business are, you know, because they built it up, they learned the skills, not because they were trained a certain way. But what also happens very often, because people don't have formal training, often they miss little nuggets of information that are often in the way of achieving that success. I remember early in my career, I would go... People are trying to listen, it's a little hard to hear. If you could please be quiet. If you want to go outside, no problem. Yeah. Early in my career, I remember I was trying to grow my skills and become a better technologist and a better strategist, and I would go to conferences and I would spend sometimes a whole week at a conference only to hear two or three keywords of certain subjects I didn't know about. And once I heard about those ideas, those new ways of working, new approaches, I would look them up and then start applying them to my own business. Right? It was like sometimes like little pieces of information that we're missing. Now, how do you know where to find that piece of information? I mean, we're all smart people, we're all intelligent people, we're all capable people. So it's not a problem of the how, but you first got to know where those gaps are. And that's where I'm going to go back to the foundations. You got to know where your bottlenecks are. And the only way to do that is just applying the same thing over and over again. You got to have metrics, you got to have ways to measure how your business is doing and start identifying where those gaps are and then hone in on that to really understand what's your biggest bottleneck and that's where you focus your energy on and once you know what that is, you're going to figure it out in a matter of no time. So, Yitzhak, I want to ask you, do you believe that you have to be a SaaS model business in order to achieve scale, or selling to the enterprise is also possible to achieve scale? And I just want to elaborate on that. Most of the Yiddish businesses, at the end of the day, are sort of an enterprise model. I mean, there are some that are not so, that are not enterprise, but we do have a lot of enterprise products in the Yiddish market. It's not the $200-$300 a month, it's the $1,000 to $2,000. And that's what he was trying to achieve. So my question is, do you think that you have to have a small market product, that means a $200-$300 a month kind of SaaS model, or a $3,000 enterprise product can also be scaled? So moving forward, if you don't build your companies, your products enough simple, ready to scale in certain ways, you stand no chance to be out there and compete. Now I'm going to say it again: you stand no chance in my opinion moving forward if your products are not in a way designed so it could scale. I just want to be more closer. I see many times people start companies, they go on the right track. Small businesses, they have a good idea, they have a good product, they know how to market that or how to sell it or they have demand. They start growing and suddenly they need to put in new systems in place, they need to hire people just like any growing business. And what I see again and again and again, that instead of focusing and keeping things simple on the foundation they started while they had that control, all they keep on doing is adding more complexity, more layers, more frustration, and the end of the game is that company is now building themselves up in a way that they will never be able to scale. And I want to say it, a company who is in that direction, to undo it, it's my opinion is very difficult if at all. A company who focuses on not to get into that position is on the right track moving forward. Raful, would you agree to the subject, the difference between an enterprise and not enterprise regarding scale? I'm going back to it, it doesn't really matter and that's really what he was saying before. It's really about the product you're selling and making sure that there's someone that's interested in buying it, right? So, you can have a really cool design for your web app. If it doesn't bring value to clients, they're not going to buy it. So whether you're trying to target enterprises or you're trying to target, you know, individuals, there's always going to be the same rules in any business model. There's only going to be two things that count, and there's nothing else that counts for any business. If you want to do business with anyone, it's always going to come down to two things: increasing revenue or reducing cost. Nothing else matters in any business. So, how can you as a business add value, right? So, if you're trying to go to enterprise, it's super simple. That's the rule you're going to keep. If you're going to individuals, how do you add value to their life or how do you take away a stressor or a challenge in their life? It's always going to be about those two things. So, it's actually, doing business well is very simple. You just got to apply the same rules incredibly persistently over and over again. And if you're ruthless with these very basic rules, there's no reason why you can't make it whether you're an enterprise or a B2C. So to elaborate on this, what you're saying is that it doesn't make a difference when they look at the revenue and the market share, what they're going to capture with their product. So whatever is easier and more, what's easier to scale, meaning what solves the problem that there is in front of us, that's what they should go for. I mean, sometimes a company will say, "Look, if I go enterprise, I only have 10,000 companies that I can try to target. If I go not enterprise, then I can target a million companies," or vice versa. Sometimes I'll say at 10 enterprise I can get to 50,000 and my other one is not to about 20,000. Yeah. I mean, I would rather solve a problem well for 1,000 people than solve a problem mediocre for 100,000 people. If I'm doing something, I want to do it incredibly well, right? So I'm always going to go back to that basic thing: what is the value that I'm going to bring to someone? Am I reducing their headaches? Am I reducing their cost? Am I increasing the value? Am I increasing revenue? And then at that point, it really doesn't matter anymore. So that's why it's so important these fundamentals. You can apply them to any business, to any situation, at any stage of your business. And if you honestly think about these things, then you're going to get the right answers. So now I would like to know like this. Get to tomorrow, everybody here is going walking into their office. What can they walk in when they walk into their office tomorrow? What can they do in order to start the journey to scale? The answer is, as Raful said earlier, simplicity. And I know everybody in this room, when they try lately to sell anything to anybody, will say that whatever I bring to the table right now is simple. It could be the most complex system and they'll claim it's simple. Very common, we have a lot of programmers. It's becoming very common that you take an old legacy system, you put a new face on it, whatever it's called, and you say it's simple. So simple doesn't mean just changing the face, how it looks. Simple means if that system had six steps to go through, could you make it that it should only be one step? Or let's say that you need to collect 10 pieces of data to put enter in the system. Could we do only three and the system should calculate and do everything in the backend? Does it involve minimal training for your staff or the customers? This is all important when it comes to software. Let me give you a way to think of physical products. When it comes to physical products, and this might be a little controversial because it's not the norm how people think when they sell products, I'm already doing telecom phone service for over 15 years. We only sell right now one model of phones, it's Polycom. It's considered the best in the market. We never added another layer to it. And the reason is very simple. We don't have to first deal with many different bugs from different vendors and challenges. We could easily integrate it with our backend platform. We already went through multiple transitions to be to the scale where we're right now. We have the most advanced telecom system. If we would have had so many different models of phones, it would have been impossible. The idea from this is keep your stuff simple. Don't add, it's not always the mitzvah to add more products and to accommodate that type of customer, that type of customer. Know what you're selling. Know what you're doing. And I want to bring up one more point. When it comes to selling a product, we're all guilty of it. We have multiple tiered pricing. We have this price for that customer, that price for that customer. We have contracts. We sell in a package, a la carte, separately. It's very complicated, and if we need to hire a sales team, a salesman or anybody, it's even complicated to explain the process to that salesman. Doing this already 15 years, one product, everything included. There's no contract, no negotiation. I don't care if it's a single user or it's 150 users. Baruch Hashem, we have accounts from 450 users. They pay the exact same price than the accounts of a single user. There are a few companies there who have my service and they could attest to this statement. And I always tell my customers, "If you find anybody on an invoice, they pay different, you will never ever have to pay again an invoice in your life with me because everybody pays the same." To finish, this is the mindset. Everybody here in this room should go home. What could you do tomorrow in your business to simplify it, to eliminate all those different steps, layers, and I promise you, you'll be on the right path to success. What do you, what would you say to this? Everything he said if that's your bottleneck. And this is really important because again, you've got to keep it really simple, but you've got to know what that bottleneck is. But what is that next step for me? It's honestly go take a walk, go sit on the couch, close your eyes, relax and go mentally through each part of your business to start thinking about where gaps might be, where do you want to spend time on understanding of where areas are that you might want to address? Um, so let me ask like this. So how can people identify what the bottlenecks are? Meaning, there are sometimes I can't let this go because I need, I need to get this little feature done or I have to wait for marketing to do this. So what would you categorize as a bottleneck or, yeah, I think it goes back to that story about the factory, right? So, um, if you, um, don't have the capacity to, um, bring on more customers, right, because you don't have enough salespeople, then yeah, that seems like a bottleneck, right? So I can't bring, I need to bring more customers in because I want to grow my revenue. But if you actually take the time to really go through each department of your business and see how well they're doing, do you have metrics? Do you understand, um, how well they're performing? You might actually come to realize maybe your sales team, you know, um, can grow and bring more people in, but does your onboarding team or does your, um, development team can, can they handle more of that? Right? So you have to go through each part of your business and ask hard questions to yourself. Ask really honest questions. Is this going to really make an impact? And do I have ways to measure that? And if you don't have ways to measure it and you don't know how to go about that, that means you don't have the right people in place, right? It's again the same simple things, the right people, the right processes. That is really what's going to make a difference. And what I would really, um, conclude with is the best thing anyone can do for their business if they don't know how to go further is to find a partner, find a better employer, um, or, or find a coach, find someone that can help you. Um, it could be consultant. It doesn't matter where that is coming, come from. You got to find someone that's going to really be able to like help you take those steps. But it's all going to start from taking the time to understand where those bottlenecks are. Thank you very much. So this is sort of the framework that we had in mind, the questions we wanted to ask. So I want to open up to the crowd if anybody has any questions. We had some questions come in via email. If nobody wants to get up and ask a question, I guess I'll go through some questions that came in. Anybody want to ask a question? So the question is to Raful, what can the Hashem learn from corporate America? Nothing. What can corporate America learn from the Jewish community? Learn halakha and you're going to solve all your problems. But honestly, the best advice I would ever give anyone is spend more time learning to increase your yiras shamayim. Yiras shamayim is the best way to create more success in your business. I can guarantee you that, tried and proven by many, many people over again. We're here for a certain purpose and making sure that yes, we're successful with our businesses, but it adds a purpose and we don't forget why we're truly here. Honestly, that's the most important thing. So I'm going to ask you a question like this. Can you give me the most craziest bottleneck that you saw in large corporate America or close to the craziest? I mean, probably shouldn't say this, but the biggest bottleneck is regulatory concerns. And it's not because they're not real concerns, but very often regulations stifle innovation. What it really comes from is do companies have the discipline to limit their own growth and their own opportunities in favor for putting in limitation in place? And when we do, we can actually be much more efficient than regulations. And this is important because this actually applies to our own businesses also. When you have a business and you have your own boundaries in place, you can really make sure that you're investing in the right place. For example, let's say you decide to hire a few more salespeople. Do you have the boundary in place where you're really going to make sure you're going to do the due diligence before that this really is the thing that's going to make that difference in your business? Is this really your bottleneck? If you have that discipline in place, great, amazing. If not, the external world is going to show you those boundaries because you're going to invest money into it and not regain it, right? So it's a really important lesson to have. So, can you have any stories for us that you dealt with corporate America or any big large companies as you're in the telecommunication? I don't know if we pass a week without dealing with this. Just recently, the last few weeks, the telecom providers decided that they are going to implement, um, they want to block spam, spam text messaging. So they decided they're going to have new regulations in place and force all the small businesses which never had anything to do with spam go through like they are doing campaigns. It was involved with, um, all different compliances, disclosures. If you don't have, didn't have a website, they didn't allow you to pass. They vetted you personally live with a physical agent. Thank you. I had to go through that. Yeah. Yeah. But now they enforce, they want to enforce the deadline was December 1st, and I outspoke about it many times, um, even on my social media account, which I was so aggravated because it didn't make sense what they did to small businesses. I'm not talking the fees involved, um, the add-on fees. The deadline was December 1st. I have to say that for a few weeks, I didn't do anything besides being busy with it, getting everybody up and running, which I couldn't because we couldn't pass. And again, thank Hashem that the last minute now before December, they removed that requirement for December 1st. We don't know when that will happen. But one thing for sure, none of my account's numbers are currently active. We have all the campaigns registered. The moment they will make that requirement, we will trigger that, and the reason is because there's a lot of disclosures which they want. And that's my point there. So they want, if you are my customer and you text me right now, I have to give you a whole megillah disclosure what I'm going to do with this, I'm not going to do with this, and I'm going to do it like this and I'm going to do like that. You're opting in, you're opting out, and it makes no sense. So that's the difference between the way they operate and the way we see as small businesses, uh, not to do. Okay. So this, I'm just going to close it up. So thank you very much for the two panelists for coming. Thank you for David, giving me the opportunity to try to be able to speak on a panel and keep my opinions to myself. I must say it was very hard. So I'm going to leave with one last thing. Everybody here that's in the tech world, I would